CD Review: Stay Awake, Jake – Cast Recording

Stay Awake, Jake – Cast Recording is available on Spotify

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Stay Awake, Jake is Tim Gilvin’s one-hander road musical that, with Norman Bowman in the lead role, won the 2014 S&S Award for Best Unproduced Musical. It has since gone on to be staged with much acclaim, first at the Vault Festival in 2016 starring Jamie Muscato and more recently at the Southwark Playhouse with Ahmed Hamad. Prior to appearing at Southwark, Hamad recorded the 14-track album, overseen by musical supervisor Nick Pinchbeck and released by McGill Productions.

The show’s opening song (‘Just Drive’) sets up the simple but canny premise – Jake is on a spontaneous and ‘loooooong’ cross-country journey by car that gives him the chance to overthink the state of his relationship… and what he can do to salvage it. A carpool confessional, it’s as if we’re an invisible passenger listening to the young man’s stream of consciousness as thoughts tumble pell-mell around his head. Things have clearly soured with his girlfriend, and Jake’s on his way to make amends.

‘Sofia’ reveals to us the name of his distant ex, and how wannabe comic-book creator Jake imagines she’ll react to his unscheduled visit, a month after their split. The manic ‘Problems’ – one of the show’s more challenging big sings – hints at his immaturity as he looks to his comicbook creations to make sense of what went wrong. And ‘Sometimes You Say Things’ is a more considered moment of mature self-discovery, giving Hamad a chance to show off his emotional and vocal range.

‘How About Tomorrow?’ fills in the details of how the couple met – she as a student, he as a first-jobber managing content for a cookery website. This upbeat tango provides a bit of colour and levity as Jake fondly remembers the mundanity of coupling up: ‘We went on a couple of whirlwind dates/A game at Sutton Laserquest/A meal at Clapham Pizza Express/Tickets to see a Tribe Called Quest’. Like much of the material, it brings to mind shows like Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years, Drew Gasparini’s I Could Use a Drink (in which Hamad appeared earlier this year) and Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days, and covers similar ground emotionally.

A reprise of ‘Just Drive’, riven with even more expletives than the original, marks the halfway point – physically and metaphysically – of our hero’s journey. The ever-more-frustrated Jake begins to hint at the real reason for his impetuous trip, which I’ll leave you to discover for yourself, and from here his likeability fades a little as he indulges in introspective self pity (‘Wake Me Up’) and reveals more about his role in the split (‘Phone Call’).

I never caught Hamad on stage as Jake but he handles himself and the demanding role on this recording with a confidence and presence of mind that attests to his ArtsEd BA training. I first encountered him as a finalist in The Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year competition in 2019, when he sang ‘Class’ from Saturday Night and ‘Against the Tide’ by Benjamin Till, and it was clear that he did indeed have class.

Since graduating, he’s proved to be popular and in demand, appearing in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Palladium (swing and cover Calypso), The Boy in the Dress at the RSC (ensemble and cover Gareth), the highly-acclaimed Rent at the Hope Mill (Benny), and the new song cycle Now or Never at the Barn Theatre. He’s also workshopped a few shows, including Lloyd Webber’s new Cinderella, and is due to tour later this year with The Addams Family as Lucas.

The crystal clarity of this recording allows you to hear every note of MD Tamara Saringer’s arrangements and Hamad’s flawless diction, and it’s all beautifully balanced. Needless to say, it’s a work that demands to be listened to – it’s thoughtful, introspective, melancholic, so not something to just stick on while doing the washing up. Tonally, it can all be rather similar – the muted colour palette is limited – but it feels naturalistic and authentic, and has just enough flecks of light to stop you from drifting off. Gilvin has no trouble writing songs that arc like a one-act play, driving you through the score.

It’s encouraging to see new writing like this benefiting from the drop in price of high-quality audio recording and live-streaming. The ubiquity of platforms such as Zoom now also seems to play a major role in allowing creatives and performers to bring their talents, even in the depths of a pandemic. So many older shows must now be lost in the mists of time, so let’s be grateful for the increasing accessibility of studio-quality production to ensure we don’t lose gems like Stay Awake, Jake.

Craig Glenday